Sony DRU530a previously working will not recognize any disc

I've been using a Sony DRU530a DVD RW drive for several months now on a Dell Pentium 1.7Ghz with 768MB memory with no problems. I've burned DVD movies, slide shows, DVDRW backups, CDRW and CDR music CD's, all with no issues or compatibility problems on my Dell Inspiron 600m. I've used Roxio, Nero and MyDVD successfully, but have settled on Nero most of the time. All of a sudden, out of the blue, the drive will not recognize any CDR, CDRW, DVDRW or DVDR disc, it only says "there is no disc in the recorder". It also will not recognize commercial DVD movie discs, but it will recognize commercial preburned CDROM discs.

The hardware appears to be normal, with no device conflicts or anything unusual in Device Manager. Everything else on the system appears to be fine, 2nd CDRW fully functional, two hard drives fine. I've not installed any new hardware or software, virus and adware scans are clean.

I can't imagine what could suddenly make it inoperative other than a simple drive hardware failure.

Interesting, but no cigar. I perused the MSKB, Sony KB, and web in general looking for a simple solution but found none. And actually, I have no device problems or error messages, it's all clean. Thanks anyway.

Yes, I have reinstalled the Intel Ultra driver software, no difference. I also saw a message somewhere about changing from Master to Slave, so I've tried all those combinations, no difference. I just today got an email response to my Sony report several weeks ago, advising I must call. That's be fun, I'm sure. If I find a solution, I'll post it back here, but I'm afraid the unit somehow fried itself.

Manage projects of all sizes how you want. Great for personal to-do lists, project milestones, team priorities and launch plans.
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I am experiencing the exact same thing. All I can think of is that it is the Windows XP Serv Pack 2 update that caused this - but it is a wild guess. Did you perhaps upgrade your XP installation to SP2 recently?

No, I'm running Win2K. Sony support (after maddening waits) advised I uninstall any and all DVD burning software, then try the diagnostic again. It still failed to recognize a disc, so they gave me a RMA number.

No comment has been added to this question in more than 21 days, so it is now classified as abandoned..
I will leave the following recommendation for this question in the Cleanup topic area:
PAQ/ refund

Any objections should be posted here in the next 4 days. After that time, the question will be closed.

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